State of Contempt

At what point do people start getting as mad as hell?

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, ‘with a ghastly affectation of life’, after all life and truth has fled out of it…

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution

Foreign observers, mark my words: something very bad is going to happen in Britain in the next handful of years. A lot of bad things have happened already, in a sense, but I’m talking about something bad enough that the country is going to be pored over as a ‘what not to do’ case study the world over for decades.

I don’t need to make this point to British readers - they know it already. They feel it in their bones. You just have to live here. Let me illustrate with a tale of woe which is very local and will at first glance strike you as being of niche interest, but which says something significant about where were are heading. This is the saga of the Tyne bridges and the gradual collapse of civic infrastructure in Newcastle-Gateshead.

Here, first is a photo of the River Tyne as it runs through Newcastle upon Tyne (on the north/right bank) and Gateshead (on the south/left). As you’ll see, there are a lot of bridges (seven, in the space of 2 km), most for road traffic, but one pedestrianised and another two purely now used for public transport.

These bridges are in many ways the architectural highlight of the entire city region and they are rightly famous. They were mostly constructed during a period when Newcastle upon Tyne was one of the world’s great industrial centres and Britain was imbued with strength and confidence, and to look at them today is to glimpse fleeting folk memories of that era. Sadly, though, they have collectively fallen on hard times, and they have become iconic in a different sense - a symbol of civic neglect.

These bridges are busy with traffic at all times of day and night. The reason for this is straightforward: public transport in Newcastle itself and in the wider Tyne & Wear region is execrably bad (a subject matter deserving of many posts in itself). The rule in UK politics is that if a public transport project would make life easier for people in London it usually gets funded; otherwise it usually doesn’t. Newcastle is very far away from London, so public transport improvements just don’t happen: fuggedaboudit. We still largely rely on light rail rolling stock that hasn’t been replaced since the 1980s. This means that if you want to get anywhere in the city region on time, which is to say, if you have a job, you have to drive if you value your sanity and if you can afford it.

Most road transportation between Gateshead and Newcastle is channelled through the three main vehicle bridges crossing the Tyne: the Swing Bridge, the Tyne Bridge and the Redheugh Bridge. The most important of these is the Tyne Bridge, as it is the most central and is the one over which the main arterial road linking Newcastle, Gateshead and the urban centres of central County Durham runs. These bridges are marked respectively 1, 2 and 3 in the map below; the green line shows the route over the Tyne Bridge as it would normally run up through central Gateshead.

I put normally in bold, though, because these are not normal times, and Britain is no longer a normal country - it is a silly, badly governed, frivolous country in which nothing works. Indulge me then while I recount the whole sorry saga of what has happened to these three bridges and what it tells us about state failure in 2025.

Prelude: The Swing Bridge

The Swing Bridge is the least important of the bridges marked on the map - it only has one lane going in either direction and mostly serves local traffic along the quayside on either bank of the river - but it is beautiful and iconic:

In normal times it - the clue is in the name - swings open to allow boats to pass, rotating on the central pivot. In normal times it is a marvel of Victorian civic engineering. But these, remember, are not normal times, so the Swing Bridge no longer swings. It hasn’t swung indeed for over five years - since 2019. Take a look at a BBC news article on the subject from the end of last year if you fancy a good laugh:

Due to mechanical problems the bridge, spanning the river between Newcastle and Gateshead, has been unable to rotate for five years. There had been hopes the Grade II listed structure could be fully operational in time for its 150th anniversary in 2026. However, Port of Tyne, which is responsible for its upkeep, said it was a complex situation for which there was no quick solution.

A recent meeting of Newcastle and Gateshead's Joint Bridges Committee asked if the Port of Tyne had provided any update on its repairs. Alastair Swan, principal engineer at Newcastle City Council, said: ‘We had a couple of meetings earlier this year and they are still going through the process of what they can do and how they can do it.

‘There is an aspiration to do it in time for the anniversary in 2026.’

Britain in 2025, ladies and gentlemen: a country in which it is ‘aspirational’ that things work as they are supposed to. Boats just can’t go up the Tyne anymore - and the best we can do is hope that they will someday. The Victorians managed it; they got over the ‘complexities’; but it’s beyond us now.

The Swing Bridge, however, is still usable (albeit at some inconvenience) for cars. I mainly include it therefore for context for what follows.

Chapter One - The Tyne Bridge

The story proper commences with the partial closure of the Tyne Bridge for extensive repairs, which began in September 2023 and are expected to run for four years (!). The Tyne Bridge is a stunning achievement, but in recent years it has become noticeably tatty, as will be evident if you look closely at the photo below:

The full programme, we are told, ‘includes steelwork repairs, full re-painting, concrete repairs, drainage improvements, stonework and masonry repairs, bridge deck waterproofing and resurfacing, parapet protection and bridge joint replacement’. The cost of £41.4 million is mostly borne by the Department for Transport (who are footing £35.3 million); the rest is coming from Newcastle and Gateshead Councils - though there is more to say about this below.

The Tyne Bridge refurbishment has been, to use the technical term, a right royal pain in the nether regions of one’s choice. The Bridge normally has two lanes going in either direction but since the work has started at any one time one lane on each side has been closed. And because of the aforementioned public transport issues, nobody trusts trains as an alternative. The consequence has been massive tailbacks through the middle of both Gateshead and Newcastle as people queue to get through the bottle necks on both sides of the bridge (the area affected is marked in orange below; the area that is circled is the Swing Bridge).

At busy times this can easily transform what should be a 15 minute car journey from southern Gateshead to north Newcastle into one taking 45 minutes to an hour or more; on a match day, when the city gets flooded with cars, it can be longer even than that.

This would be bad enough of course (why does it need to take four years?) but we’ve recently learned that the project might not even get completed. This is because all of a sudden there are doubts about the funding. On the 21st of January Sir Keir Starmer began muttering darkly about ‘difficult decisions to save public finances’ and it started to seem likely that the Department for Transport would no longer foot the bill for getting the job done - at least to the amount expected. There is a bit of confusion about whether this pertains to the £35.3 million initially put forward, or the £6 million-ish balance, which Rishi Sunak may have gratuitously promised when he was PM. But, in any event it looks as though the money may not be there. (This is on top, as an aside, of the cancellation of funding to turn the A1 into a dual carriageway as it runs through Northumberland, also announced last year, which itself is another subject worth many posts in its own right. People not from the region may be shocked to discover that the main motorway running from Newcastle, a big city, to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, for much of its length only has a single lane in either direction, and that this will remain the case apparently in perpetuity.)

We are then, 18 months into a four-year long project to refurbish a bridge, which is inconveniencing a large proportion of the population of Newcastle-Gateshead and might not even get completed to specification, and which looks increasingly (to use Alastair Swan’s word again) ‘aspirational’. But the problems by no means end there. This is because all of that backed-up traffic coming up through Gateshead to cross over the Tyne Bridge has to have somewhere to queue, and the place where it has until recently been queueing is the main flyover which runs through Gateshead itself. Let’s now then turn to the issues concering that particular piece of infrastructure.

Chapter Two - The Gateshead Flyover

The A167, which is the road that comes up through Gateshead and over the Tyne Bridge (marked in orange in the image above), is elevated for a long stretch through the middle of central Gateshead proper, over what Americans would call an overpass. Unlike the Swing or Tyne Bridges, it is neither lovely nor valued - it is a horrible concrete monstrosity, built in the 1960s when British architects had truly collectively taken leave of their senses:

Late last year, it was suddenly announced that for safety reasons the entire thing had to be closed immediately - it was in danger of imminent collapse. The official story is that this is due to ‘spalling’, meaning water seeping into the concrete and causing it to come away from the steel in the structure, but local suspicions are that the thing simply couldn’t support the weight of traffic having to sit on top of it at all times of day to queue onto the partially closed Tyne Bridge.

In any event, it’s a debacle, and as details drip out the picture begins to look worse and worse. We learn, for instance, that while Martin Gannon, the head of Gateshead Council, was quick to reassure everybody that the structure had been being inspected every week for years to ensure its safety, it actually, er, hadn’t. His testy interview, given at the time of the closure, is a priceless example of thinly-veiled disdain for his audience and the people who elected him:

Of course it is regrettable, of course we apologise for the inconvenience caused by it. But it was properly maintained, it was expertly inspected regularly, and as a consequence of that diligence catastrophic consequences were avoided. That is not just fantasy, it has happened elsewhere in the world and elsewhere in this country. It is due to the good stewardship and management of the engineers within Gateshead Council and our contractors brought in for that purpose that injury, and potentially fatalities, were avoided.

We have, you see, to be grateful that the structure didn’t fall over and that it was closed in time - really, we should be thankful that we’re not all dead. Thank goodness for Martin Gannon and his excellent leadership. But in the meantime, it seems we have to wait, and wait, and wait. Here is what Gannon has told us about the likelihood of the problem being resolved (probably by demolition of the entire structure and replacement by a normal road):

I cannot give a definite timeframe on demolition because a report is being prepared at the moment…It will be, I think, less than a year. But it will be a really complex, difficult piece of work which will have to have some really intensive communications around advising people what will happen in the various phases.

Ah, those dastardly complexities again. It all sounds very ‘aspirational’, doesn’t it? In any event, what it means is that navigating between Gateshead and Newcastle has become even more infuriating and difficult:

The red oblong shows where the flyover is, and the red line going through it is the route which is no longer available - the road is closed. The only two options for cars are now to go the orange route indicated above (coming in through residential streets and then taking a sharp right through - obviously intense - traffic to queue to get on the Tyne Bridge at a different angle) and the yellow route, which leads to the other main road bridge that I mentioned (circled in red), which is the Redheugh Bridge. You may ask why the yellow route I’ve traced doesn’t reconnect with the orange one where they almost come together just before the Tyne Bridge - good joke! That stretch of road is only for buses and (nonexistent) cyclists.

This is all a fiasco in itself. The Redheugh Bridge goes to the West End of the city and to get through the city centre from there one has to go through a tangle of one-way systems and bus lanes that nobody from outside of the region has a cat in hell’s chance of successfully navigating. But the punchline is that now something appears to be wrong with that structure, too…

Chapter Three - The Redheugh Bridge

The Redheugh Bridge is the ugly red-headed stepchild of the Tyne Bridges. But I have a fondness for it; the views from the top, looking out over the Elswick Docks with Tynedale in the distance, can be breathtaking, and on a windy day (of which there are many in Newcastle) a journey across it, barrelling along at 50 mph, takes on an air of excitement - it sometimes feel as if a strong gust could simply fling your car and everybody in it into the Tyne at any moment.

But now, given the problems elsewhere, it too is facing an inflated load of traffic each day, and it is also now buckling under the pressure. It is reported to be suffering from ‘crumbling concrete’ and drainage issues, and preliminary estimates suggest a repair job costing at least £1m - though this will undoubtedly turn out to be an underestimate. The population of Gateshead waits with bated breath - because if it closes then things may become genuinely harum-scarum, with almost the entirety of the traffic between the two conurbations being channelled through a single lane either way on the Tyne Bridge. ‘Road rage’ will not begin to describe the consequences of this.

Contempt

Superficially, this a tale of manifest, systemic incompetence: modern day Britons are daily now confronted with the gulf between their own capacities and those of their forebears - like Dark Age Romano-Celts forced to wake up each morning and gaze in mystification at Hadrian’s Wall and wonder how it was constructed. This would obviously be bad enough, were it not for the fact that we also have to daily endure hearing about the absurd sums that the UK government splashes around on things that almost no British taxpayers consider to be a priority. Readers based in Britain will have their own favourite examples of this, but the one that has been in the news the most recently is the so-called ‘Chagos Islands Deal’, in which the UK is supposed to give up sovereignty of those islands to Mauritius (apparently purely to assuage colonial guilt) and then lease the archipelago to the tune of somewhere in the region of £9-18 billion.

So pity the poor population of Newcastle-Gateshead, having the option only of looking glumly at the decaying infrastructure all around them (they get a lot of time to do so, waiting in crawling traffic), which could probably all be fixed several times over for 5% of the sum which the government is planning to bung to Mauritius, and stewing in their sense of malaise. They are left by this in no doubt. What is important, the only thing that is important, to those who govern Britain is looking good in the eyes of international opinion with regard to the fashionable causes of the day. The message that is consequently communicated to the people of the city, coming through both loud and clear, is that the government has no use for them, does not consider their interests to be important, and, all things considered, rather wishes that they would all just kindly go and collectively jump into the muddy waters of the Tyne. Those who govern express in everything they do an attitude of deep regret that at some point in the distant past somebody thought that ‘democracy’ would be a good idea and that they therefore have to ever bother themselves with our petty concerns, needs and desires. And they try their best to ignore those petty concerns, needs and desires except where absolutely necessary - ideally only once every five years at General Election time.

The sense of contempt in all this is palpable - it isn’t just incompetence. Ordinary British people just don’t appear to matter to those who govern them. And you can see this - you can smell it, you can even taste it - in the very atmosphere itself in the country, like a permanent pea-soup fog.

The interesting question which arises more and more then is: at what point does all of this begin to actually get dangerous? I do not suggest that we are on the verge of a revolution or anything so dramatic as that. But we are at the point - sometimes I think we are beyond the point - at which the regime under which we are governed faces breakdown. The fundamental rationale on which it relies (namely, that government is necessary because it makes life better) is deteriorating rapidly and flagrantly. It is becoming painfully evident that everything is getting worse and that government is making it so. And the national mood is as a result by turns becoming ever more disgusted, apathetic, and febrile. I come back to where I began, then: something bad is going to happen here. It is at this stage almost baked in. We can all feel it. The only real question is exactly what it will be and how it will shake down when it is triggered.